Young voices reveal hope for a secure Afghanistan

Exclusive: When they come, Kobra Jamal can�t stop the tears. She is only 19 years old and although in many ways she represents the future of Afghanistan, she is scarred by its present, too.

When they come, Kobra Jamal can't stop the tears. She is only 19 years old and although in many ways she represents the future of Afghanistan, she is scarred by its present, too.

Kobra is a student at a vocational institute in the capital Kabul, and she is proud of that, but she becomes emotional when she talks about her father. "My father is still in hiding," she says. "He has been forced to leave his home because of the Taliban."

Kobra's father was a teacher, but he was targeted by the Taliban and forced to flee his home in the Ghazni province south of Kabul. Ever since, his life has been shadowed by fear; he was even forced to wear a burqa and disguise himself as a woman so the Taliban would not find him. "He is living in a refugee camp now," says Kobra. "He receives no support and has developed a psychiatric problem. How can I be satisfied?"

It is a clearly a struggle for Kobra to tell her story without breaking down, but hiding in among the grief for what the Taliban have done is pride that she is studying to be an engineer. The vocational school where she is a student is set in a beautiful little compound splashed with colourful flowerbeds and overlooked by the mountains, but it is also surrounded by heavy security. This school may be open and free inside, but it is a pocket of openness in a city under lockdown.

There are many other such pockets in Kabul, and they appear to be multiplying, but for now they are nothing more than blips in an otherwise grim radar message. When we drive through the city, we travel in reinforced American vans that move around in convoys designed to minimise the risk of attack by the roadside bombs that have become the signature weapon of the Taliban. If we are attacked, I'm told, the worst that will happen is we will roll over a few times. But this blacked-out monster of a vehicle is the only safe way for us to get about; on the whole, Westerners are still not able to walk around freely.

Looking through those windows as we drive across the city, there are signs of hope next to signs of the delicacy of the situation. Children play in the street or walk to school and the markets seem busy. Plastered on walls everywhere are posters for the presidential election that will happen here in a few weeks, but just above them, curled along the top of the walls, is roll after roll of barbed wire. The young people I speak to at the institute are divided about what the elections mean, and have very different ideas about how Afghanistan should move into its future. Jamsheed is a confident 20-year-old who takes what is maybe a typical confident 20-year-old's approach to the problem; the answer, he says, is to get tougher. "We should be serious and catch all the Taliban and kill them," he says passionately. "Hang them!"

He believes President Karzai has not been tough enough. "He has filled his pockets. He has not made security better and security is so important in this country."

Behesta, 19, is much more positive. The very fact she can go to this college is a step forward; under the Taliban women received no education and the head of the school tells me that many of the girls are anxious about how fragile their new human rights might be. They may be young, but they remember the insidious weight of the Taliban regime. "Eight years ago there was no freedom of expression," says Behesta. "Now there is a lot of construction and the city is being rebuilt. I don't think the Taliban will come back."

Behesta may be right; it's obvious that the Taliban are not at the gates of this city. The reason for that, of course, is the metallic fist of security here. At most big roundabouts the Afghan police, masked in black, sit on top of their distinctive green cars, their guns pointing into the air. Near the US embassy or the headquarters of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which controls most of the Coalition troops, it is even heavier. I meet Jim Dutton, the British deputy commander of ISAF, behind the concrete walls that encase his HQ and he tells me this Kabul closedown is positive. "There's a lot more visible presence of policemen," he says, "but that's a good thing, not a bad thing." The theory is that the feeling of being safe, and the security being provided almost totally by Afghans themselves, will help win those hearts and minds that foreign troops always seek to win.

Their success at this depends on so many things, not least the fact that the lungs of the Taliban continue to breathe so strongly in the south. A massive surge of American troops is already under way but insurgent attacks are also up. It's been a mild winter and the temperature in Kabul is certainly pleasant, but the cold fact behind the climate is that the farmers have harvested their crops early and are now ready to do their other job: to fight. It means that this summer there will almost certainly be more and more blood splashed on the sand here.

At Nato HQ before I headed to Kabul, I met Vice Admiral William D Sullivan, military representative of the US to Nato, who said he was expecting that the rise in troops would mean a rise in violence. "The insurgency has grown in strength," he said. "As we have applied more forces to the theatre we have forced more combat."

As more people die, the young Afghans I spoke to in that pocket of peace in Kabul may waver. Abdul Ansir is 20 and dreams of a place called Oxford in a country called the United Kingdom, where he has heard the education is the best. "I want to come back to my country," he adds, planning further ahead. "I want to rebuild my country."

We drive out of this pocket, this plateau of calm, back out into the streets, over the pock-marked roads, past the rubble of buildings that have been destroyed, past the piles of rubbish, past gun after gun after gun held by the policemen, and the optimism I felt from Abdul fades a little.

Perhaps this coming summer, when so many more American feet will stride across the south of the country, we will begin to know whether Abdul's hopes of a rebuilt nation are going to be realised.